No More Dialup: Grandpa Gets DSL

We all talk about needing multi-megabit-per-second home Internet, but not everyone needs it.

Here at EE Times we may be led to believe that everyone has high-speed internet access. Let me tell you though, high-speed is a relative term.

Chances are, we all started with dialup Internet access in the 1990s. The thought that there are people who still use it makes us scratch our heads and wonder why, but it's true. Some people refuse to get higher speed for a variety of reasons.

Take my father-in-law. He was quite happy paying $5 a month for Juno, a dialup internet service. But it drove his daughter and her husband a little crazy. Why? Because whenever Grandpa went online, his home phone was busy. I mentioned to him several times that he could get high-speed (1 Mbit/s) internet access that's always on for $15 a month, but he didn't want to pay for it.

This year, we had enough. For his birthday, we gave him a DSL phone-line filter and told him that we'd sign him up and pay for the first year. He reluctantly agreed. Last weekend, I went to his house to install the DSL modem. To my surprise, the modem connected right away. Now all I had to do was connect it to Grandpa's Windows XP computer and do a little setup, or so I thought.

First came installing the DSL filters. You just plug the phone's RJ-11 connector into the filter and plug the filter into wall. Simple, right?

Not if you have a wall phone.

The kitchen phone is on the wall with a long coiled cord to the handset. No need for a cordless phone, but there was no way to hide the filter behind the phone and attach the phone back to the wall. Grandpa could live with that so we put the phone on the kitchen counter. There was enough room.

Next came the Windows setup. The instructions were unclear at best and downright confusing at worst. We did get it to work, but it took a call to DSL Extreme tech support, which is very busy on weekends. All I had to do was set up a new connection in Windows and we had connectivity.

Grandpa was impressed. But he didn't believe me when I told him that he could now use his phone and connect to the internet at the same time. I not only had to call his landline, but leave a message on his answering machine.

Before leaving, I rebooted the computer. Now we had a problem, for it was no longer connected to the DSL. I found the connection icon I had created in Windows, clicked on it, and the connection was restored. At this point, I was running out of time, so I created a shortcut on his desktop. He just had to right click on the shortcut after booting and click "connect," but he shouldn't have to. I suggested that he call tech support on Monday when they're less busy. He did and they walked him through how to set up an IP address (instructions said to use DHCP to acquire an IP address automatically). Now, he just boots his computer and he's online. Grandpa is happy. "It's so fast," he said.

You see, high-speed is a relative term. But, will Grandpa pay the $15 a month next year? I believe he will.

I've had DSL services problems twice where in the evenings, my data rate dropped to zero--unusable.

Apparentyly, DSLAMS can get old and when the do, they slow down during peak service times (evenings). The solution both times was to move li copper pair to another DSLAM port. The first time was before DSLExtreme and the old ISP ws clueless. I spent weeks dealing with them and finally called a press contact I had a Verizon. It then took a few days to get fixed. On the seond time (with DSLx), I knew the priblem. They had it fixed the next day. That's why I stay with them.

I'm still a believer in a pair of twisted copper wires back to a for-real central office in spite of having cell service as well. We had a tornado in our neighborhood a few years ago, fortunately, our house was spared major damage, but the infrastructure did not fare well......except for the phone service. It never hiccuped even though our electricity was out for a full week and cable/Internet was out for 10 days. Cell service was very unreliable as the nearby towers were damaged. I'll keep my POTS line.

Landlines were designed for five nines reliablity, i.e. up 99.999% of the time. Cell phones can't even come close to that, at least not yet. For that reason, I'll keep my land line thank you. If I need to dial '911' I want the call to go through.

Another advantage to a land line is higher availability during a power failure. Just make sure that you have at least one hard-wired phone in the house to supplement your cordless phones.

Don't forget options such as Google Voice (if you trust Google; there are similar non-Google services). For example, you could give out your GV number to everyone, set up call screening, and then have it ring your cell phone. The call screening (and GV's filters) should keep spam calls very low.

MeasurementBlues - I'm still hanging on to a land line as sort of a backup for the house, and to send all of the junk calls too. I suspect it would be cheaper, though, for me to cancel the land line and add one of my older cell phones to my account, and use it for the home.